She stared off into space, missing James. One good thing came as a result of his first book’s good press: a gig on the local public radio station, a five-minute essay once a month on any topic of his choosing. There were drawbacks, the main one being that he had to work with a difficult producer, whose name was Mel. Also, the three-page essays usually took a week to perfect. But they were bringing him a small following, and a few stations up the coast rebroadcast the show via satellite, and besides, it paid two hundred dollars a shot. So he wrote his essays and some articles and book reviews for some magazines, while waiting for the stamina to begin a new novel.
Her azaleas came in colors from snow white to violet. She had read that the Japanese love azaleas, love the explosion of color, and that lots of Japanese gardens have very old azaleas in them. And therefore, Elizabeth thought, I respect azaleas, because the Japanese know things.
She loved her dark brown irises, so statuesque and velvety, like Eleanor Roosevelt. And she loved her reeds and bamboo and grasses—because this garden was not all about flowers; flowers fade.
But Elizabeth’s real love was and would always be her roses. Sometimes she came out and set up a folding chair, just to sit with them. She experienced a tremendous feeling of force from them, like a low hum or silent white noise—almost a sense of sitting in the middle of waves of rhythm and color. In the morning, wet, the garden felt crisp and clean and new, and in the afternoon, tired; like the rest of us, it had to get through the whole goddamn day. And toward dusk, you could actually feel the garden wind down.
She weeded around a perfect red rose called a Mr. Lincoln, thinking for a moment about how briefly he blooms and how that was one of his most beautiful qualities. And then she blinked, looking up, puzzled by movement across the street in Amy Haas’s empty old house—a blur on the porch, big as a human, disappearing around a corner.
She stared, craning her neck as if this would let her see around the corner, and after a moment she saw a hulking brown shape in the back of the house. Whatever or whoever it was appeared to be bent over at the waist. She couldn’t see well in the fading afternoon light, but she thought she saw someone dark or light brown step out like a shadow from behind a wall for the briefest moment, before disappearing again even deeper in the beams and scaffolding. And suddenly she thought, it’s Luther, stoop-shouldered lumbering Luther. That’s him across the street, watching. Fear flooded her, and she gaped at the deserted structure. Now there was no movement in the building, and—her mouth dry with anxiety—she stood stock-still wondering if she had been imagining things. But what if she had seen him, here, on their street, fifty yards from their home, watching?
She got up slowly, unsteady, not breathing, and went inside to watch from her kitchen window. But there was nothing. Now she was no longer sure. She stood there watching the silent empty house for over half an hour. No one appeared. Licking her lips, pushing the hair away from her face, she stood watching vigilantly, telling herself she was crazy, but unable to pull herself away. She locked the front door and waited for someone to come home. When, after half an hour, no one had, she picked up Rosie’s racket and, holding it like a club, walked over to Amy Haas’s old house to investigate. There was no sign that anyone else had been there that day, unless it was a deer, for there were only long hoof marks in the new grass behind the house, in the green furring over of the yard.
ROSIE felt so clumsy and afraid sitting next to Charles while he slept. His nurse had been surprised to find her at the door and expressed dismay that because it was so late in the day, she didn’t know if he’d wake. But Rosie had thrust her bouquet of yellow tea roses at the nurse and gone in to sit by his bed.
She sat watching him sleep, trying to will him awake by the sheer force of her stare. He smelled so different since he got so sick—of medicines and alcohol, of old clothes like something from the as-is department of a secondhand store. Boy, talk about as-is, she thought, studying his face, his emaciated body under the blanket; he looked as torn and worn as some terrible tweed jacket Luther might wear in early spring, when it was still cool out. Charles seemed barely alive. He smelled like the stuff old people put their teeth in. He smelled like the inside of an electric shaver. He smelled like old hair and soap and toenails. Once she had spent the night here with him after Grace had died, and she had found his electric shaver plugged in to the socket next to the bathroom sink, but the top was off the metal shaver part, and she could see and smell his old hair inside the metal part, and she felt like she was spying on one of his most private places.
There was a plate of orange wedges on the little hospital table by his bed, oranges on an aqua blue saucer, and a number of memories popped into her head all at once, like bubbles—memories of going to the Petaluma dump with Charles all those times over the years, ever since he moved back to town and bought the old Ford pickup. They’d fill the back with garbage and magazines and head up to Petaluma. He liked to put country music on the radio for their dump runs. He drove slowly because he was old even then. It would just be the two of them. Who else would even have wanted to go? After driving on the freeway for half an hour, they’d leave the main road that ran into Petaluma and head up the little two-lane through the woods that led to the bumpy dirt road that led to the dump. You could smell the sweet decay and smoke way before you got there, and Charles would roll down his window and look over at her with glee. “There it is, doll,” he would say, and they’d inhale it like it was fresh bread baking in the oven, smiling at each other, pantomiming delight. It was the smell of a thousand oranges going bad, a thousand oranges and always some smoke and something strange like ether or a combustible that the dump people must pour all over the garbage to get it to burn or to kill the little brown rats you’d see scuttling in and out of the piles of garbage. The guy at the booth would tell them where to pull in—or rather, where to back up the truck—and Charles would back up to the pit and get out slowly, the way he moved with a little arthritis and just generally being old and no spring chicken, as he was the first to say. And he’d open the back of the truck and he and Rosie would start pulling out stuff, pitching it down into the pit, working alongside other families who were doing the same thing; you’d see an ancient Life magazine go tumbling by, one you really wished you could look at, and an old Snoopy doll, or one old brown wing tip with mildew on the toes. There would always be all these odd people, besides the regular dumpers like her and Charles and the other families. The other people were like the dumpees; maybe they were vets or something, she wasn’t sure, but there were always all these mysterious people in Budweiser hats, like rag people who came out of nowhere to paw through all the stuff people were throwing out and load it into their own crummy dumpy cars. And the thing was, Charles would always stop and talk to everyone, like it was right after church, just the way her daddy used to talk to everyone when they’d walk into town together. Charles didn’t go to church very much. But he’d stop and admire something one of the rag people had salvaged, a hubcap or an old toaster, as if he were at the hardware store in Bayview, helping someone pick out just the right crescent wrench.
After a while she had to get up and take the plate of orange wedges out to the nurse, because the smell was making her feel too weird. “I don’t think he wants these,” she explained, handing the plate to the puzzled woman.
“Is he awake?” the nurse asked, with surprise.
Rosie looked helplessly into her face for a long moment. “No,” she said finally. Shrugging, the nurse took the plate off to the kitchen without another word.
He slept the whole time she was there. She kept clearing her throat loudly, but at the same time she was secretly glad she could just watch him sleep, not have to try to think of things to say. She thought back to that first time he let go of her when she was riding her red two-wheeler and how when she turned back and found him waving to her, she was so afraid because she didn’t know how to turn the bike. She was sure that if she turned the wheels at all, the bike would fall
over, so she slowed down as far as she could and kept on pedaling straight ahead, praying for there to be no cars in the crosswalk, which there weren’t, and finally she came to the cul-de-sac at the end of the street where she lived, and she braked gently and slowly turned the handlebars. It had felt like trying to turn a wagon train around, but she hadn’t fallen over.
ELIZABETH was walking across the street swinging Rosie’s racket and looking discouraged, as if she had just lost an important match, when Rosie came riding up on her bike. Rosie braked to a stop next to her mother and glared.
“What are you doing, Mama? Why do you have my racket?”
“I … I thought I saw someone hiding over at Amy’s house. I—”
“You were going to hit them on the head with my racket?” Rosie said incredulously. “Why didn’t you take James’s baseball bat? That costs like twenty bucks. And Mommy, if you see someone you think is a bad guy, you call the police. Don’t you even know anything?” She pulled the racket roughly out of Elizabeth’s hand, pedaled across the street to their house, lay the bike on its side in the front yard, and stalked up the garden path, swatting at thin air.
ROSIE was so unpleasant at dinner that Elizabeth stopped feeling guilty about having gone to bed. James had gotten home from the city, where he had taped his essay for broadcast sometime the following week, and he had bought Thai takeout with part of the check Mel had given him. They talked about their days. Rosie told him about Charles, how he had slept all day, but she made sure not to include her mother in the conversation.
The food was all so delicious, pork with spinach and peanuts, pad Thai, chicken to dip into spicy sweet-and-sour sauce. Elizabeth savored each forkful, the friendliness of her husband’s voice. Rosie glumly pushed a bite of pork around on her plate with long slow strokes, as if mopping something up, but James and Elizabeth were so glad to see each other that they mostly just talked about nothing in particular.
“Can I come to the tournament with you tomorrow?” James asked Rosie. A tournament had started in Fremont, and Rosie wasn’t scheduled to play until the following day.
She shrugged. “If you want,” she said.
“Hey, baby,” Elizabeth said sharply, “you are sitting on my last nerve now.” Rosie gave her a long sideways look. Why do you have to be such an insolent little shit? Elizabeth wondered, looking away: this guy’s willing to give up a whole Sunday to cheer you on. And you’re so lucky to be loved by him.
And he did love Rosie so. He loved her even when she was stomping around; he loved her even through the tears and hysteria, the grief caused by feeling left out at school or losing a match on the circuit, by unrequited love or raging hormones. He loved her even when he whispered to Elizabeth that she was the she-devil. He loved her tonight, when she squeezed all the lime on her own pad Thai, leaving none for anyone else.
And he even loved her the next morning when she didn’t return his greeting. She was sitting catatonic at the table and staring off unseeing, the posture and mood he called Tar Baby in Bayview. Coming upon her this way, James peered down, positioning himself in the path of her gaze, Brer Rabbit first laying eyes on the beautiful creation.
“And how,” he asked with panache, “is your disposition situated, O lovely lady?”
And when Rosie glowered and said nothing, James drew back and said with a strong Southern accent, “Your shyness stirs my heart.”
“WHY are you in such a good mood?” Elizabeth asked, watching him, feeling his happiness. After breakfast she had followed him upstairs into his office, where he had pushed around piles of paper and notecards until he found a small notebook. He tucked it into the back pocket of his jeans and sat down in front of his computer.
“I cannot work with you today,” he told it. “Rosie has a tournament.” Elizabeth stood behind him smiling. She began to rub his neck, and he let his head drop onto his chest. “Me and my computer finally know how to start our new book,” he said.
“You do? Honestly?”
“Yep,” he said. “Me and my computer, we are ready for love.”
It had been months since he had gotten any decent work done, months since his first novel hit the stores, garnered some good reviews, and sold less than two thousand copies.
“When are you going to start?”
“Monday.” She stroked aside some of the soft brown hair that covered the collar of his shirt, rubbed the pale skin underneath, pushing her thumbs against the taut ropy muscles that betrayed the tension he carried, the tension of being a writer, a husband, a dad. “Oh, don’t stop,” he moaned.
“We need to go in a minute,” she said, but she rubbed his shoulders anyway, and he groaned. There were notecards taped to the wall by his desk, notecards on which he’d written little messages to himself, notecards he didn’t want to lose in the lovely chaos of his desk. She read them now as she stood behind him, rubbing his shoulders. Some she had read before, but there was a new one. “Fiber adds bulk to the stool,” read one piece of newsprint taped to an index card, “and among Finns stool tends to be three times larger than among New Yorkers.”
“Honey,” she asked, stopping her massage to point to the card. “How on earth will you use this?”
He raised his head slowly to see what she was reading.
“Writing,” he said rather primly, “is an extremely mysterious process.”
HE helped Rosie pack for her match that day, bringing her a washcloth, sunscreen, a waxed paper bag of cashews and raisins mixed together. And he brought along a tape to play in the car as they drove to the East Bay, an old Phoebe Snow tape he knew she liked.
TWO days later, the morning was socked in with fog. Children were milling around the Fremont Golf and Tennis Club, studying the draw, watching the matches, brooding, playing cards, playing Ping-Pong. Simone had lost the day before; Rosie was in the quarterfinals. Rosie and her opponent had been sent to the junior college courts to play, and she had forbidden James or Elizabeth to come along. So they sat on the sidelines at the club with the other parents, watching the match on the nearest court, where a boys’ fourteen-and-under semifinal was in play. In the hour since they’d arrived, James had already called his answering machine twice. There were no messages.
Dane Williams, seeded number one in the boys’ fourteen-and-under draw, had been the unrequited object of Rosie’s affection the year before. He was playing a boy no one had ever heard of, a kid half his size, who stood on the baseline and returned everything that came over the net. Dane won the first set easily, but the smaller boy was holding his own in the second, and at three games apiece, he broke Dane’s serve. Two games later, Dane left the court hunched over, wiping at his eyes. He went and sat under a tree and cried.
“Oh, I can’t bear this,” said Elizabeth.
“But, honey. The little kid deserves to win,” said James. “He’s playing the top seed, someone forty pounds heavier, and he’s just playing his little heart out.”
“But there always has to be a loser, doesn’t there?” said Elizabeth. “Oh, well. I wonder how Rosie’s doing.”
ROSIE was seeded fourth, which meant she had been expected to get to the semifinals, and this was the round she was playing. Her opponent was an eleven-year-old named Marisa DeMay who’d won her quarterfinal round by default—the second seed had come down with leg cramps during the match. Rosie had been relieved just to get to the round she was expected to make, but now she was dismayed to discover that this unseeded girl, who’d gotten into the semis on a fluke, was actually very good. Rosie was so anxious about losing—even before they’d started keeping score—that it threw her game off. She and Marisa were playing long hard rallies, and Rosie had just barely won the first set, seven-five. Mrs. DeMay was doing needlepoint on the sidelines (an eyeglass case with a picture of teddy bears) and rarely looked up. Rosie was spooked. Her usual strategy and strength were consistency and infinite patience. Other players—Simone, for instance—lacked the patience for endless rallies and would try to put the ball away
out of sheer boredom, but Rosie could wait all day for an opening if she had to. She didn’t care. She just wouldn’t miss until, like a break in the weather, a corridor opened down which she could discharge a lethal ground stroke.
But today, against tiny little Marisa, she was in trouble. It was like playing Thumbelina, except that Thumbelina hit as hard as a boy. On top of it all, she bounced around a lot and made an annoying squeaky noise. Rosie, a foot taller, two years older, was unnerved. She wanted the trophy so badly she could taste it, the trophy she’d get for playing in the finals, and here was this runt on the other side, chasing down every shot like a crazy little Chihuahua. She thought of her mother in bed the other day, depressed and overwhelmed.
She began patting in her second serves, like the old people did at the club—“Hey, nice serve, Ruth Ann,” Peter would have said—and chanting to herself in an incantory way, “Head down, head down, one two three one two three.” Tiny Marisa flitted around the court making squeaky sounds of effort, a little cat toy that just wouldn’t miss.
Both of them held serve until four all, and fear beat inside Rosie. She could hardly manage a forehand, while little Squeak-jump on the other side batted the ball from side to side. Rosie served a puffball forehand at thirty all, and Marisa put it away down the line. Adrenaline flooded Rosie like a sudden fever. Her hands were shaking; one more point and Marisa would break serve, be ahead five to four, zipping along on a roll, with her irritating mother stitching away, maybe humming. Rosie began to fixate on Marisa’s mother and whether she was in fact humming or not. She was about to serve, but stopped and tilted her head toward Mrs. DeMay, straining to hear.
“What?” said Marisa.
“Nothing,” said Rosie.
It was hard to catch her breath. She served a deep loopy backhand that miraculously dropped in, and Squeak-jump lobbed it back, and Rosie pushed back a forehand that barely landed over the net, and Marisa tapped it back, and they rallied for this critical point like that—dinking, pushing, patting endlessly, until Marisa hit a ball near the baseline. And it was not solidly on the line, but it was definitely in, touching half an inch of white. It was the most basic rule of tennis sportsmanship that you always gave your opponent the benefit of any doubt. If her ball was so close you honestly couldn’t say for sure whether it was in or out, you played it as in. This ball was definitely, though barely, in, and time became thick and vacuumy and so silent that it was almost noise, and Rosie turned as if to hit this backhand, saw that Mrs. DeMay was reaching for something she’d dropped, and without really thinking about it, Rosie caught the ball on her racket and called it out.